Subject: I think I fixed it
Author:
Posted on: 2022-04-02 18:25:05 UTC

So here's what I'm rather confident happened.

  1. You had an unterminated HTML tag in the subject line, something like <i Words instead of <i>Words</i> or even <i>Words (which'll get fixed up automatically).

  2. Since this wasn't strictly speaking an empty subject line, the Board's database let that go through

  3. However, when the Board displays text like the subject and the body, it gets run through an HTML cleanup to make sure of things like that only specific tags can be used (to prevent nefarious nonsense). One part of this cleanup is throwing out stuff like <i Words, since, if it was left in, it would make a big chunk of the page disappear (because people's browsers would just keep looking for more and more information about how the italics were supposed to work until they finally got to a point where they could guess "ok, there's probably a missing '>' back there).

  4. If that cleanup process led to removing all the text in the subject, then the result of cleaning would be a blank subject, which would duly get used as the text for the link.

This has now been fixed to detect when this happens and replace the blank text with [[[bad HTML in subject]]] so there's still something to click on.

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